The Canadian Commonwealth eBook

in Canada. These investments included large
holdings of city property in Montreal and Winnipeg
and Vancouver, of ranch lands in Alberta, town sites
along the new railroads, timber limits in British
Columbia and copper and coal mines in both Alberta
and British Columbia. The Portland, Essex, Sutherland
and Beresford families have been among the investors.
It does not precisely mean the coming of an English
aristocracy to Canada, but it does mean the implanting
of an enormous total of the British aristocracy’s
capital in Canada for long-time investment.

It would be untrue to say that these investments have
all been wisely made. One wonders, indeed, at
what the purchasing agents were aiming in some cases.
I know of small blocks in insignificant railroad towns
bought for sixty thousand dollars, for no other reason,
apparently, than that they cost ten thousand dollars
and had been sold for twenty thousand dollars.
The block, which would yield twenty per cent. on ten
thousand dollars, yields only three per cent. on sixty
thousand dollars. Held long enough, doubtless,
it will repay the investor; or if the investor is
satisfied with three per cent., where Canadians earn
twenty per cent.—­it may be all right; but
Canadians expect their investments to repay capital
cost in ten years, and they do not buy for profits
to posterity but for profits in a lifetime.

Similarly of many of the r_an_ches bought at five
dollars an acre by Americans and resold as r_awn_ches
at twenty-five dollars to forty dollars to Englishmen.
If the Englishmen will be satisfied with two and
three per cent., where the American demands and makes
twelve to twenty per cent.—­the investment
may make satisfactory returns; but it is hard to conceive
of enormous tracts two and three hundred miles from
a railroad bought for fruit lands at twenty-five dollars
an acre. Fruit without a market is worse than
waste. It is loss. When questioned, these
English investors explain how raw fruit lands that
sold at twenty-five dollars an acre a few years ago
in the United States to-day sell for five hundred
dollars and one thousand dollars an acre. The
point they miss is—­that these top values
are the result of exceptional conditions; of millionaires
turning a region into a playground as in the walnut
and citrus groves of California; or of nearness to
market and water transportation; or of peculiarly finely
organized marketing unions. If the rich estates
of England like to take these risks, it is their affair;
but they must not blame Canada if their investment
does not give them the same returns as more careful
buying gives the Canadian and American.

Not all investments are of this extravagant character.
Hundreds of thousands of acres and city properties
untold have been bought by English investors who will
multiply their capital a hundredfold in ten years.
I know properties bought along the lines of the new
railroads for a few hundred dollars that have resold
at twenty thousand and thirty thousand and fifty thousand.
It is such profits as these that lure to wrong investment.